In Europe

full hours, he drilled his followers on the new party line. ‘I'll never forget that harangue,’ Suchanov wrote. ‘It amazed and shocked not only me, an apostate who was there by chance, but also all the true believers.’ Lenin launched a ferocious attack on the new leaders, calling them ‘opportunists’ and ‘betrayers of the revolution’, and that alone, Suchanov noted, ‘caused the heads of his listeners to spin’. After all, these ‘mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie’ were former revolutionaries and had all, like Lenin, spent years in exile. Until Lenin's arrival, the Bolsheviks of Petrograd had enthusiastically supported the provisional government as well. For didn't the revolution belong to everyone?
    Yet Lenin's opinions could not have come as a complete surprise. In the first telegrams and letters he sent after the revolution, he – unafflicted by any knowledge of the local situation – had already given strict instructions to the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg: give no support to the provisional government, arm the workers, all power to the soviets! His comrades had found these positions so unrealistic that only excerpts from those letters had been made public.
    Suddenly, however, yet another wild idea had been added to the list; namely, that the transition from the ‘bourgeois democracy’ to the ‘socialist revolution’ had to take place within a few months. When he left Zurich, Lenin had said that Russia was a ‘country of farmers’, ‘one of the most backward countries in Europe’. A place where socialism could not ‘immediately triumph’. Somewhere along the way, he must have changed his mind.
    As soon as he arrived in Petrograd, Lenin began talking about the need for a ‘second revolution’, in order not to ‘become a slave to capitalism’. All power was ‘immediately’ to be placed in the hands of the soviets. This, less than one month after the fall of the czar, sounded the death knell for the provisional government. It also constituted a definitive break with the Mensheviks and the other revolutionary groups. Lenin's sudden change of course clashed with almost all the revolutionary theories, which assumed that a long period would be needed between the ‘civil revolution’ and the ‘proletarian revolution’. That was held to be particularlytrue of less developed countries such as Russia. The slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ seemed less than practical too. Those councils, after all, had always been little more than loose configurations of contentious committees for the organisation of workers’ strikes, and could hardly be expected to assume governmental power immediately.
    The day after his arrival, Lenin launched the April Theses, the new programme he had worked on during his train journey: no support for the provisional government; withdrawal from the war; a complete break with capitalism; the expropriation of all private lands; the nationalisation of the banks; the dismantling of the army and the police corps and the establishment of a republic of soviets, led by farmers and workers. His vision clashed so dramatically with the prevailing mood in Petrograd that even many Bolsheviks felt that Lenin had lost touch with reality. He had been in exile too long. ‘Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin,’ Gorky wrote at the time. ‘He doesn't know the common people. He has never lived among them.’
    Lenin ultimately emerged as the winner of the revolution. But, as the historian Richard Pipes rightly explains, that was not because of his huge support or astute vision. The Bolshevik's success lay in their cocksureness. They established bonds with precisely those groups from which the socialist parties in Western Europe had alienated themselves: farmers and soldiers. Against all the odds, they seized power at exactly the right moment. And they had powerful allies: Berlin, gold German marks and the hard winds of world war.
    A number of mysteries still surround Lenin's return to Russia. What made him change his mind during the train journey through Germany and Sweden? Some historians point to the strikingly long stop – of at least half a day – that Lenin's ‘sealed train’ made in Berlin. They suspect that, in the course of that stop, Lenin was in contact with several top German officials concerning the strategy to be pursued. It is a wild assumption, for an escapade like that does not match up with Lenin's extreme caution on precisely this point: in